great vacancy in American life, perhaps never until the moment of Bourne's coming more than partially seen, had been filled. During prep-school days, in college, during the first contacts with mature life one had looked hopefully over many a spotless collar, under many a smart straw hat, been drawn by many a sincerity and purity of spirit, and then invariably stood baffled a little and bewildered; but for what one had groped, and why one had been disappointed, and what it was American life seemed to lack, that one never quite clearly knew till Bourne commenced to move through the world. Only then was there set before one where it could be perceived the fact that what one had been groping for so comically, and what America was poor for the want of, was the young American who desired not things, but high experience, and who was capable of taking the jumbled objects of American civilization and converting them into nutriment for the spirit. For the man, and the thirst for high experience, and love, and art, and impassioned living, and the capacity for converting the raw of life into wisdom and humanity; embodiments of a shadowy dream, were here.
He was the democratic individual in America; the youth of a beautiful, unrealized, ever-imminent plane of existence sprung in a society banked against that plane. He was the young being having need of living from his own centre, finding himself in a land terrorized by the conventions; bourgeois conventions giving themselves out for the laws of the universe, and proclaiming themselves from every pulpit and school-platform. In a society full of external and assumed principles, he was the man who produces his own principles from out of himself; and cleaves along a single and unswerving line in all his expressions, not because of external convictions of right and wrong, but because of some powerful and clarified impulsion deep in himself. Part of a civilization of outer frenetic movement and inner rigidity, he wanted from the world not external movement, nor external symbols of power and dominion over the persons of others, but emotion, the beauty of a rich, fecund, mature personality, the growth of the power to receive high aristocratic pleasure from the simplest common stuffs of existence. And from that society, he wanted men and women living from their own centres no differently than he from his: for the reason that their truthfulness to themselves would strengthen his own truthfulness to himself, and reveal his own mind the better to him.
